Blanketed.

A very, very long: exhale.

Two days into running my own classroom. I've traversed across the Holocaust, abolitionism, defined "precipice" and held a full conversation with a four year old. My throat is dry and my lids are heavy but my heart is full.

I wish the schoolday didn't end at noon.

When the students rise and chuck their chairs atop their wobbly desks, their pounding feet march their snow boots and their earmuffs out into the snow and I'm left, staring at my gradebook and wondering why I have to give grades when their intelligence is so apparent. 

And then a late paper comes in and I remember: Be Strong! Zero, my dear, but good effort. I enter the angry circle into the computer and frown. Why can't they all just get a hundred? :)

Morning comes again and my alarm is screaming--SIX SIX, SIIIIIIXXXXXXXX, SIX AM, SLEEPY and I groan, I moan myself out of bed and onto the cold--the frozen--floor and into my dress pants, my curled hair, my mascara, my collar. Be teacher, I command the dark circles under my eyes.

Another night of restless sleep: because I care, I CARE, if they listen or if they stare or if they twiddle their pencils or if they flip through eager pages, drinking or rejecting my words. My lessons.

Suddenly it doesn't matter if I can write it well, if the cursive looks pretty on the board, or if the sentence is eloquently stated: "Dot thine eyes and cross thy tees, my students."

Nah.

I want to know I can be heard. To be heard, to be understood: do you know what it is to care for young minds?

How could I ever be a mother if as a simple teacher the condition, if the education, if the future of these near-STRANGERS not only means so much but drives me so much into a passionate fury. You are too young not to enjoy learning, that you may love and BREATHE it every day,

the rest of your days,

my students. My friends, compatriots, Watchers, Listeners, hearts, smiles:

my children for the hour. 

And at the conclusion of a too-short-too-long-day, I sigh my way up the hill, textbooks and laptop and heart in tow: to an empty house shrouded in snow and I tilt my chin to the sky--"WHY, clouds? Why pour your white on me each night that I must dig my way out in the dawn?"

So lonely, these walls, especially when the days are filled with such sound. I come home, not to a home, but to a Cave and not to a Heart but to a phone. 

I am torn between pure joy and lonely sorrow. I long to be embraced. I shook a hand today and silently willed that she might hold on a little longer. But the Strange fingers were released in customary tone and the imprint left shadows in my skin.

I miss, I miss: Belonging in the arms, in the heart, in the Soul of--a Home.